The Dread Pirate Roberts, head of the most brazen drug trafficking site in the world, was a walking contradiction. Though the government says he raked in $80 million in commissions from running Silk Road, he allegedly lived under a false name in one bedroom of a San Francisco home that he shared with two other guys and for which he paid $1,000 a month in cash. Though his alleged alter ego penned manifestos about ending "violence, coercion, and all forms of force," the FBI claims that he tried to arrange a hit on someone who had blackmailed him. And though he ran a site widely assumed to be under investigation by some of the most powerful agencies in the US government, the Dread Pirate Robert appears to have been remarkably sloppy—so sloppy that the government finally put a name to the peg leg: Ross William Ulbricht.

Yesterday, Ulbricht left his apartment to visit the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library in the southern part of the city. Library staff did not recognize him as a regular library patron, but they thought nothing of his visit as he set up his laptop in the science fiction section of the stacks. Then, at 3:15pm, staffers heard a "crashing sound" from the sci-fi collection and went to investigate, worried that a patron had fallen. Instead, library Communications Director Michelle Jeffers tells us that the staff came upon "six to eight" FBI agents arresting Ulbricht and seizing his laptop. The agents had tailed him, waiting for the 29-year-old to open his computer and enter his passwords before swooping in. They marched him out of the library without incident.

For a promising young physics student from Austin, Texas, this wasn't how things were supposed to turn out.

Ulbricht, in happier times.

“Choose freedom over tyranny”

Sure, you could buy meth, LSD, cannabis, heroin, and MDMA on the Silk Road, but the hidden website wasn't (just) about drugs. Silk Road was, said its owner, about freedom. In January 2012, as part of a "State of the Road Address" posted in the site's discussion forum, the Dread Pirate Roberts explained the site's goal: "To grow into a force to be reckoned with that can challenge the powers that be and at last give people the option to choose freedom over tyranny."

To that end, the Dread Pirate Roberts built the Silk Road marketplace in 2011 as a "hidden" service accessible only over the encrypted Tor network. To connect, users first had to install a Tor client and then visit a series of arcane site names (the most recent was silkroadfb5piz3r.onion), but the reward was a simple, effective marketplace to buy drugs from sellers all over the world using such Internet commerce staples as escrow accounts and buyer feedback. The product was shipped through the mail, direct from seller to buyer, keeping the Dread Pirate Roberts clean. The only link between him and the drugs was the money, and Roberts eventually took only the electronic currency called Bitcoin to make this hard to trace. He even ran a program called a "tumbler" to route incoming Bitcoin payments through a complicated series of dummy transactions, so as to make them infeasible to trace through the public Bitcoin blockchain. Out of each transaction, Roberts took a cut—8 to 15 percent, depending on the size of the sale.

This eventually earned Roberts a pirate's treasure. By 2013, Silk Road had nearly one million user accounts. In the 2.5 years the site operated, it facilitated 1.2 million transactions worth 9.5 million Bitcoins—or about $1.2 billion in total money exchanged. (Bitcoin values varied widely over this period.) Roberts picked up a cool $80 million in commissions.

No surprise, then, that the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the FBI all joined forces to track down Roberts and the largest sellers on his marketplace. In November 2011, after coming under pressure from Congress, the agencies began the hunt and quickly found that Roberts had been right—encryption, Tor, and "tumbled" Bitcoins were a potent combination to crack.

Ulbricht at his 21st birthday party.

But investigations always have many threads to pull. The feds couldn't initially follow the money to Roberts, nor could they find the physical location of his cloaked servers. In the absence of usual digital clues, the feds fell back on a low-tech approach: keep going back in time until you find the first guy to ever talk about the Silk Road. Find that guy and you probably have a person of interest, if not Roberts himself.

So they looked, assigning one agent to conduct "an extensive search of the Internet," in the FBI's words, looking for early Silk Road publicity. The earliest post ever to mention the site appeared on a drug-oriented forum called shroomery.org, where a user named "altoid" had made a single post. It read:

I came across this website called Silk Road. It's a Tor hidden service that claims to allow you to buy and sell anything online anonymously. I'm thinking of buying off it, but wanted to see if anyone here had heard of it and could recommend it.

The post directed readers to visit silkroad420.wordpress.com, belonging to the blogging operator WordPress, where further instructions would be found for accessing the real Silk Road site. A subpoena to WordPress Revealed that the blog had been set up on January 23, only four days before the Altoid post. If this wasn't the first mention of Silk Road, it was certainly one of them.

Altoid became a person of interest, but who was he? Further research revealed that Altoid had been posting on a board called Bitcoin Talk—further suggesting a possible link to the Silk Road, which operated on Bitcoin. A key break came when the agent found an October 11, 2011 post by Altoid, looking for an "IT pro in the Bitcoin community" and directing all inquiries to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com."

A subpoena to Google revealed that this account was in fact registered to one "Ross Ulbricht." The account was also linked to a Google+ profile, which had a picture of Ulbricht and a link to his favorite videos on YouTube. The videos provided a key clue; several of them were from the libertarian Mises Institute, whose views jibed with the leanings of the Dread Pirate Roberts. In addition, Roberts had repeatedly linked up Mises videos when posting in the Silk Road forum and had referenced "Austrian school" economists like Ludwig von Mises, for whom the Institute was named. The clue was suggestive but not conclusive.

Still, the pieces were coming together.

The economic simulator

With the name Ross Ulbricht, the feds went to other social networks. They found Ulbricht on LinkedIn, where he talked about his dissatisfaction with the physics work he had been doing as a graduate student at Penn State. "Now, my goals have shifted," Ulbricht wrote. "I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind... The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

Could the "economic simulation" be, in fact, Silk Road? One tantalizing hint comes from an anonymous article published in alternative newspaper The Austin Cut, located in Austin, Texas where Ulbricht grew up. The story was, in essence, a primer on how to build Silk Road and an explanation of what made the site so amazing—and the answers were "freedom" and "lack of force."

"Hackers, anarchists, and criminals have been dreaming about these days since forever," wrote the author. "Where you can turn on your computer, browse the web anonymously, make an untraceable cash-like transaction, and have a product in your hands, regardless of what any government or authority decides... This is about real freedom. Freedom from violence, from arbitrary morals and law, from corrupt centralized authorities, and from centralization altogether. While Silk Road and Bitcoin may fade or be crushed by their enemies, we've seen what free, leaderless systems can do. You can only chop off so many heads."

The article's author then relayed a telling anecdote from Silk Road, one in which people began arguing over a botched deal. They got angry; one threatened violence, but he was simply mocked by other users because he had no way to find his target. "It showed how successful Silk Road really is," wrote the author. "It makes drug buying and selling so smooth that it's easy to forget what kinds of violent fuckers drug dealers can be. That's the whole point of Silk Road. It totally takes evil pieces of shit out of the drug equation. Whether they're vicious drug dealers or bloodthirsty narcotics cops, both sides of that coin suck and end pretty much the same way. Death, despair, madness, prison, etc. Thanks to decentralization and powerful encryption, we're able to operate in a digital world that is almost free from prohibition and the violence it causes."

This fits with Ulbricht's arguments, and the piece might well be by him, providing a better sense of why he saw the experiment as such an important one. We asked the editor of the Cut what he thought. "I wondered the same thing," he said, but he added that he didn't know who wrote the piece.

In any event, the feds had a name but no hard evidence linking Ulbricht to the site management. They knew that Ulbricht had moved to San Francisco and was staying for some time with a friend, and they knew that whoever was logging into the "rossulbricht" Gmail account was doing it on occasion from the friend's house. But the next link in the chain only came when the feds uncovered a post on the popular coding advice site StackOverflow.

In early 2012, Ulbricht registered a StackOverflow account using his Gmail address; the username was "Ross Ulbricht." On March 16, Ulbricht asked for help with connecting "to a Tor hidden server using curl in php." He included several lines of code that weren't working quite right. Perhaps realizing that this was a bad idea, one minute later Ulbricht changed his username to "frosty" (he changed his e-mail address a bit later), but he had already revealed his interest in running Tor sites.

At this point, the government gets cryptic. On July 10, 2013, Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package coming from Canada into the US as part of a "routine border search." This package contained nine counterfeit IDs, each of them in a different name, but each of them showing a picture of Ulbricht. They were addressed to his San Francisco address.

Two weeks later, the government found the Silk Road servers in various foreign countries, though it won't say how. (The FBI gives no indication that Tor was compromised in this case, though given that the agency has recently found ways to spy on Tor users, it's hard to absolutely rule out the possibility.) It's possible that finding various aliases for Ulbricht enabled agents to track the money used to pay for the servers, but the events may have been unrelated. The main Silk Road Web server was found in "a certain foreign country" that has a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the US. Under the terms of that treaty, the government asked for an image of the server's hard drives, which was made on July 23 and then turned over to the FBI.

(Update: Computer security research Nicholas Weaver speculates that "the FBI (with a warrant) hacked the site sufficient to discover the site's IP by generating a non-Tor phone-home and then contacted the country of the hosting provider which then got the server imaged. Yet since the server imaging didn't involve taking the server down or disrupting service sufficient to spook Mr DPR into taking his bitcoins and running, I suspect that this was some virtual-machine hosting provider." But at this point, no one knows.)

Three days later, agents from Homeland Security Investigations visited Ulbricht's 15th Street home in San Francisco. They found him at home, where his two housemates knew him as "Josh." One of them told the agents that "Josh" was "always home in his room on the computer." As for Ulbricht himself, he refused to answer most questions, though he did volunteer one curious bit of information, apparently as a way of indicating that such documents could be obtained so easily that anyone might have ordered them, or that he had been framed.

"Hypothetically," he told the agents, anyone could visit a site named "Silk Road" on "Tor" and order any drugs or fake IDs they wanted.

I don't entirely buy the story that the FBI did all the work here. I'm sure they did the majority of the legwork and infecting the Tor nodes, but it's quite likely they had a lot of illegal data from the NSA to help them along, like the DEA does. And like the DEA, they have to pretend that didn't happen, because that risks the case getting thrown out.

Basically, why wouldn't they? The NSA has all the internet and tracking data, and tons of certs - of course the FBI would use it when going after a billion dollar drug market.

I find it interesting just how much of a libertarian utopia bitcoin actually is. This guy had a beef with two different people and the only recourse he has is to murder them.

And of course because he didn't want to do it himself, he tried to hire guys that ended up just ripping him off, and his only recourse there would be to hire more guys to go after his fake hitmen or do it himself. The ideal libertarian paradise.

It's no surprise that he's living in a crappy apartment even though he has millions of dollars worth of bitcoins. Converting bitcoins back to real US dollars is hard, and near impossible if you're talking about millions of dollars worth. There's just not enough currency in the system to support that. Bitcoin exchanges are only sized to handle pocket change.

I don't entirely buy the story that the FBI did all the work here. I'm sure they did the majority of the legwork and infecting the Tor nodes, but it's quite likely they had a lot of illegal data from the NSA to help them along, like the DEA does. And like the DEA, they have to pretend that didn't happen, because that risks the case getting thrown out.

Basically, why wouldn't they? The NSA has all the internet and tracking data, and tons of certs - of course the FBI would use it when going after a billion dollar drug market.

Still, it's a fascinating story, thank you!

I bet the NSA is helping the FBI "create a clean yet false" evidence trail as we speak ...

I don't entirely buy the story that the FBI did all the work here. I'm sure they did the majority of the legwork and infecting the Tor nodes, but it's quite likely they had a lot of illegal data from the NSA to help them along, like the DEA does. And like the DEA, they have to pretend that didn't happen, because that risks the case getting thrown out.

Basically, why wouldn't they? The NSA has all the internet and tracking data, and tons of certs - of course the FBI would use it when going after a billion dollar drug market.

Still, it's a fascinating story, thank you!

Hard to say--certainly possible FBI hacking was involved. But given the dude's apparent mistakes, not implausible that they simply found a way to trace his payments for the servers or something. This is one of those cases you hope goes to trial just so all the details come out.

I don't entirely buy the story that the FBI did all the work here. I'm sure they did the majority of the legwork and infecting the Tor nodes, but it's quite likely they had a lot of illegal data from the NSA to help them along, like the DEA does. And like the DEA, they have to pretend that didn't happen, because that risks the case getting thrown out.

Basically, why wouldn't they? The NSA has all the internet and tracking data, and tons of certs - of course the FBI would use it when going after a billion dollar drug market.

Still, it's a fascinating story, thank you!

I bet the NSA is helping the FBI "create a clean yet false" evidence trail as we speak ...

This quipped my interest

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At this point, the government gets cryptic. On July 10, 2013, Customs and Border Protection intercepted a package coming from Canada into the US as part of a "routine border search." This package contained nine counterfeit IDs, each of them in a different name, but each of them showing a picture of Ulbricht. They were addressed to his San Francisco address.

Two things really catch my eye. First, the "routine border search." Lucky breaks (or negligence -- it went to his address after all) happen, but the federal government has also been shown to be more willing to push the bounds of the rules at borders, NSA revelations notwithstanding. Routine is not the same as legitimate, and I doubt the feds would want that difference highlighted if this actually involved methods justified with a, hmmm, creative legal interpretation.

The second is that the guy who apparently wanted to create a system free from economic and violent coercion (even when dealing with already unsavory types) thought he had no choice but to resort to unsavory acts performed by unsavory types to preserve himself, and probably also the system of which he was very proud. Similar inclinations are present in the drift of many governments toward authoritarianism. No plan survives contact with the enemy, as they say, and apparently his idealism didn't survive contact with blackmail.

Thanks for the great write-up. I know you've had more time to work on this than the early articles out there about what was going on, but this is seriously 10x better than anything I've read on this news.

My pappy always said don't do the crime if you can't do the time. And while I enjoyed doing the mental exercise of how people who DO do the crime, pull it off, I'd quickly decide that I in no way, shape, or form, had the skills, knowledge, or balls to do something like that. And I certainly wasn't willing to risk doing the time. But still, I did have a strange admiration for people who did since having that combination of knowledge, skills, and balls IS impressive in a strange sort of way. Depending on what sort of crime, I could also deplore those people as well, while leaving some room to still be impressed, if that makes any sense.

But it sounds like perhaps I have overestimated the ability of these folks I was marveling at. Be it the hackers or the Silk Road guy, most of them apparently didn't have the ability to pull it off either ... they just had the balls and deluded themselves into thinking they had the knowledge and skills. Balls alone, will only get you so far in the world of crime. And without the knowledge and skills to go with the balls, you're not likely to stay where you do get for long. And I am thankful I haven't had the balls to get caught up in that life.

I find it interesting just how much of a libertarian utopia bitcoin actually is. This guy had a beef with two different people and the only recourse he has is to murder them.

And of course because he didn't want to do it himself, he tried to hire guys that ended up just ripping him off, and his only recourse there would be to hire more guys to go after his fake hitmen or do it himself. The ideal libertarian paradise.

It's no surprise that he's living in a crappy apartment even though he has millions of dollars worth of bitcoins. Converting bitcoins back to real US dollars is hard, and near impossible if you're talking about millions of dollars worth. There's just not enough currency in the system to support that. Bitcoin exchanges are only sized to handle pocket change.

Silk road isn't (well, wasn't) bitcoins: that particular site happened to use bitcoins, period. There are plenty of legal businesses who are pioneering its use, even a couple who just got married who are making a documentary on how they try to live 3 months just using bitcoins.

And by the way, the time of bitcoin exchanges being only sized to handle pocket change are long gone: 120'500 BTC were exchanged on MtGox during the last 24 hours. The current exchange rate being around 125 USD per bitcoin, you need very big pockets for that kind of pocket change.

What about the people whose lives this drug dealer is destroying? The lives he ended with his hitmen? The lives ruined by these drugs?

I don't understand you.

The hiring hitmen is despicable, but the "lives drug dealers destroy" is bullshit. If society really cared about lives ruined by drugs, they'd ban alcohol. Alcoholism dwarfs drug use when it comes to ruining lives. I'm not saying drugs are harmless (in general), but I do think it's a choice people should be allowed to make for themselves. I also think their harm is being a) overstated, and b) exacerbated by their illegal nature.

Fair is fair, though - society drew a line in regards to legal and illegal substances, and you cross that line at your own peril.

I bet the NSA is helping the FBI "create a clean yet false" evidence trail as we speak ...

What about the people whose lives this drug dealer is destroying? The lives he ended with his hitmen? The lives ruined by these drugs? I don't understand you.

Look, we're not saying this guy was a good guy (obviously, he wasn't, looking for hitmen), but the 'if you're not for them you're against them' mentality is infantile. Ulbricht being a scumbag and the FBI using the NSA's illegal evidence are not mutually exclusive things. And now this just goes back underground. It's not like busting Silk Road affects the demand side, just the supply side.

The hiring hitmen is despicable, but the "lives drug dealers destroy" is bullshit. If society really cared about lives ruined by drugs, they'd ban alcohol. Alcoholism dwarfs drug use when it comes to ruining lives. I'm not saying drugs are harmless (in general), but I do think it's a choice people should be allowed to make for themselves. I also think their harm is being a) overstated, and b) exacerbated by their illegal nature.

It is a bit more complicated than this.

Alcohol cannot be realistically banned because it is trivial to make. As alcohol cannot be banned, it is a bit hypocritical to ban less-harmful substances, so we should legalize everything which is less bad than alcohol (obviously tobacco and a few other things are, but...)

However, many of these drugs do indeed have pretty profound negative effects on the health of their users and put others in danger. Heroin is vastly addictive and simply cannot be legalized. Likewise, many prescription medications need to be legalized for similar reasons, in addition to restricting people's ability to kill themselves with them and, in the case of antibiotics, prevent people from overusing them.

Also, I severely doubt they actually used the NSA. The NSA has better things to do than compromise their assets helping with a drug bust. It sounds like this guy made a lot of mistakes.

Of course, there's nothing that says that the FBI hasn't compromised Tor. Frankly Tor being compromised is something I simply assume as being true; the US government certainly has the ability to do it, and I could see them keeping it a secret.

Those of you claiming it's ironic that he resorted to murder are right, but those of you suggesting that's this sort of thing is the inevitable result of the libertarian dream need to check yourselves.

If it was really a libertarian dream, none of it would've had to be hidden and so the violence would've never been necessary.

The violence is still the result of government.

[I'm not addressing the validity of the libertarian dream FYI; just pointing out that a few of the comments I see are on shaky logical ground]

"I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind"

"In my eyes, Friendlychemist is a liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed."

"On January 26, 2013, Roberts asked that the former employee get "beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back." A day later, afraid that his former employee would squeal to the police, Roberts asked if it was possible to "change the order to execute rather than torture?"

What about the people whose lives this drug dealer is destroying? The lives he ended with his hitmen? The lives ruined by these drugs?

I don't understand you.

The hiring hitmen is despicable, but the "lives drug dealers destroy" is bullshit. If society really cared about lives ruined by drugs, they'd ban alcohol. Alcoholism dwarfs drug use when it comes to ruining lives. I'm not saying drugs are harmless (in general), but I do think it's a choice people should be allowed to make for themselves. I also think their harm is being a) overstated, and b) exacerbated by their illegal nature.

Fair is fair, though - society drew a line in regards to legal and illegal substances, and you cross that line at your own peril.

L.

I think we did try banning Alcohol, and they got us where? Same thing as the War on Drugs. Some times should be restricted/banned and I doubt we can truly implement it.

Alcohol cannot be realistically banned because it is trivial to make. As alcohol cannot be banned, it is a bit hypocritical to ban less-harmful substances, so we should legalize everything which is less bad than alcohol (obviously tobacco and a few other things are, but...)

However, many of these drugs do indeed have pretty profound negative effects on the health of their users and put others in danger. Heroin is vastly addictive and simply cannot be legalized.

Marijuana and other herbal drugs are easier to make than alcohol. Meth is easy enough that labs can fly by night. And as the reply above notes, alcohol was banned in the US for about a decade.

Alcohol and tobacco are allowed because they were already entrenched in European culture by the time anyone seriously tried to enforce a ban on anything. They can't be banned simply because they're too popular among the white guys doing the banning. Sucks for the South Americans forced to sign treaties to criminalize their own traditional drugs.

Those of you claiming it's ironic that he resorted to murder are right, but those of you suggesting that's this sort of thing is the inevitable result of the libertarian dream need to check yourselves.

If it was really a libertarian dream, none of it would've had to be hidden and so the violence would've never been necessary.

The violence is still the result of government.

[I'm not addressing the validity of the libertarian dream FYI; just pointing out that a few of the comments I see are on shaky logical ground]

And how, pray tell, would the Dread Pirate have gotten his money/revenge if this thing was out in the open?

Oh, right. Get the government to arrest the other guy. How libertarian.

Alcohol cannot be realistically banned because it is trivial to make. As alcohol cannot be banned, it is a bit hypocritical to ban less-harmful substances, so we should legalize everything which is less bad than alcohol (obviously tobacco and a few other things are, but...)

However, many of these drugs do indeed have pretty profound negative effects on the health of their users and put others in danger. Heroin is vastly addictive and simply cannot be legalized.

Marijuana and other herbal drugs are easier to make than alcohol. Meth is easy enough that labs can fly by night. And as the reply above notes, alcohol was banned in the US for about a decade.

Alcohol and tobacco are allowed because they were already entrenched in European culture by the time anyone seriously tried to enforce a ban on anything. They can't be banned simply because they're too popular among the white guys doing the banning. Sucks for the South Americans forced to sign treaties to criminalize their own traditional drugs.

You do realize that almost everyone in the Americas is an immigrant, right? Mostly from Europe, with some from Africa and a few from Asia. There are very, very few Native Americans left of any sort - they make up only a tiny fraction of the population of the Americas.

As for the rest of it: No, they aren't. To grow pot, you must have pot to begin with, and growing pot requires you to be growing plants inside your house. Meth is harder to make than alcohol as well, and considerably more hazardous to produce.

Alcohol was relegalized because it was just impossible to enforce the ban on it. It just didn't work.

Libertarianism schmibertarianism. If you want to defend someone against the government, at least pick someone who deserves it. Not addicts or dealers who exploit them.

Even if intoxicating drugs were legal, it would still be wrong to use or sell them. Consider Michael Jackson. He didn't break any laws, nor did his doctor, except committing malpractice.

Do you really want your lazy idiot brother or teenage kid to have easy access to dope? The government is unselfishly trying to protect us.

Going overboard has turned it into a stupid arms race against determined addicts and traffickers, which is unwarranted. And some banned drugs aren't, in fact, particularly dangerous, but just collateral damage of what became a cultural crusade.

The problem with the war on drugs is that it costs too much money. The solution isn't to put more effort into drug distribution. That just advances the arms race further.

The libertarianism single-mindedness that would glorify drug trafficking is pretty much identical to the prohibitionist single-mindedness that would disqualify someone from leadership for life because they tried marijuana. Disconnected from reality.

You do realize that almost everyone in the Americas is an immigrant, right? Mostly from Europe, with some from Africa and a few from Asia. There are very, very few Native Americans left of any sort - they make up only a tiny fraction of the population of the Americas.

Have you ever seen anyone from south of the US border? Do Mexicans look like Europeans, Asians, or Africans?

Spanish colonialism wasn't about displacement. The native culture was marginalized to varying degrees, but much survived. Legalization of coca has been a big deal for Evo Morales, president of Bolivia.

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As for the rest of it: No, they aren't. To grow pot, you must have pot to begin with, and growing pot requires you to be growing plants inside your house. Meth is harder to make than alcohol as well, and considerably more hazardous to produce.

Um, pot plants don't prefer the indoors; that makes no sense. It's called "weed" because it's so easy to cultivate.

The point is that meth is easy enough to make that a ban doesn't work. It's marginal, but they'll never stamp it out (or drive the price up too high, or what I'm really trying to say is end local production in any one area).

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Alcohol was relegalized because it was just impossible to enforce the ban on it. It just didn't work.

A ban doesn't need to work to stay in place. It was banned for a really long time, too. It was legalized because it was popular, and because the huge black market created too many career criminals. That's a side effect quite separate from not working.

Folks on here touting the label "libertarian" must really have a need to find an ideology to hate. Your tribalism is the whole reason we have the "us vs them" conflict. Judge the individual by what they say and do, not by their labels. Labels are rarely ever representative of the truth nor accurate. People that use labels are taking a shortcut because they are too lazy or shallow to get to know the individual before passing judgment. It's easier to hate people when you keep your distance through labels. I'm not saying this guy is innocent or right, but calling him such things is not honest. Nobody is a perfect representation of the group their label assigns them to. Most of the time, what you think is the definition of a label isn't even the reality, but a distortion created in your own mind about what that group is because it's easier to pigeon-hole someone and blame them than to actually get to know them. It makes it easier to dehumanize, to hate, and justify atrocities against entire cultures. This has happened before, the label used to justify horrid acts of cruelty was "Juden". Clearly, people are just as susceptible to such mentality as they were back then.

@Potatoswatter

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Do you really want your lazy idiot brother or teenage kid to have easy access to dope? The government is unselfishly trying to protect us.

Unselfishly protect us? Not by a long shot. The outlawing of drugs was started as a political move to get rid of minorities and industries that threatened to compete with an incumbent industry, not to protect the people. It was expanded and perpetuated to create lucrative employment at the expense of the people's tax money. It's exists to keep certain people employed. So no, they are not being altruistic in their attempt to stop the distribution of illicit drugs, they are doing it to serve their own ends.